This week, the Spanish pop superstar Rosalía released a new song called Despechá. It’s a zippy, zingy track – a kind of minimalist take on merengue and mambo that finds her rapping and singing about fickle fame and even more fickle boys over bright piano chords and a flinty, industrial beat. It’s only been officially out for a couple of days, but in Spain it has been the song of the summer for weeks. Go to any Rosalía concert and you’ll find tens of thousands of fans singing along; speak to people on the street, and they’ll likely have heard it too.
This is not a Josie and the Pussycats-style brainwashing situation, but another example of the way TikTok is fundamentally changing the way we interact with music. Where songs used to worm their way into the cultural psyche – and, as with Glass Animals’ slow-rising Heat Waves, sometimes still do – they can now reach full societal saturation before they are officially released.
